On New Years Eve, The Times newspaper published an article entitled, “Make lessons fun to keep children in school, ministers told.” In the article, Pepe Di’Iasio, the general secretary of ASCL, reportedly talked about “subjects, such as art, which provide an outlet for less academic students.” My experience of being in lots of schools these past three and a bit years makes me think that what Mr Di’Iasio said is misguided.
Pupils who like a subject primarily do so because they are taught by highly trained teachers who know their stuff and make the content irresistible. The pupils pay attention, think hard, are challenged by the content and learn. They then taste success and become increasingly hungry for more. In my experience, the subject itself is not important when it comes to determining whether a pupil enjoys studying it; rather, the quality of teaching and the pupils’ levels of success are what heavily influence whether a pupil enjoys a subject.
I have also seen enough lessons and spoken to enough teachers and pupils to get the sense that pupils don’t like easy stuff. They like hard stuff, and lots of it. When Mary Myatt and I interviewed a Year 6 pupil with ASD and ADHD for our book SEND Huh, we met Harry and his mum Belle. Mary followed up one of his comments about liking to be challenged by what he is taught:
I like hard because it’s learning, because if it’s easy, you’re not really learning because you can just do it, but when it is hard you are thinking, so it stays in your head. I like hard, because you have to think about the question, and that makes it stay in your head more. But easy, you don’t have to think – you’ve done it, and you just don’t think about the question.
Mary said in response to Harry, “I think lots of teachers need to hear this message.” Indeed - his reply is, perhaps, something Professor Becky Francis should bear in mind while she reviews the curriculum.
More recently, I have been writing two books, one on primary teaching and one on secondary teaching, the first drafts of which will go to the publisher on Monday. I have been into the classrooms of 18 truly great teachers. I have spoken to their headteachers, their colleagues, their pupils, and them, watched them teach, collated testimonials and gathered their pupils progress data. Each 8,000 word chapter profiles a single teacher. The subjects I have seen taught vary from Media Studies to Food Technology to mathematics. The youngest teacher was 24 and the oldest, 66. And I have been lucky enough to persuade Professor Rob Coe to write the foreword.
Writing these two books has been a joy, and one that has made an old heart, young, as I continue to pass the baton on. And I have learnt a huge amount in the process of gathering all that information. I have seen first-hand how much pupils love learning difficult stuff and love being taught by people at the top of their game. The pupils and the teachers were both having fun because they were both being successful. One Primary 5 pupil in a Northern Ireland school said that her teacher, “has made my sums better. We do hard sums but easy methods.”
We have to keep the sums hard. We have to teach every subject well. We have to make challenging content irresistible. What we don’t need to do is sacrifice curriculum challenge for fun. The best way, as far as I know, to have fun in the classroom is for the pupils to be successful; fun should equate to being able to do hard stuff with confidence. Our challenge is to teach hard stuff as well as we can - that is the best thing we can do if we want to make lessons fun. If, in the name of fun, we just do easy stuff, pupils like Harry won’t thank us for it.
PS. In 2015 I published a book called, This Much I Know About Love Over Fear – creating the culture for truly great teaching. A decade on, I will publish two follow-up books, This Much I Know About Truly Great Primary Teachers (and what we can learn from them) and This Much I Know About Truly Great Secondary Teachers (and what we can learn from them). Both plan to be published by Crown House in the early Summer 2025.